1.8.1-Pilferingapples
Brick!club, Les Miserables Vol 1. Book 8: Counterstroke: Ch. 1:In What Mirror M. Madeleine Looks at his Hair I am actively sad to have missed the heartbreaking Wait What confusion of the courtroom scenes— some of my favorite in the book!— but there is NO WAY I’m facing Fantine’s death alone. Brain, I don’t care if you’ve nothing useful to contribute, we’re in this ANYWAY. Sister Simplice is once again encouraging lies of omission— was that even a concept by this point? I honestly have no idea— which intrigues me. I’ve mentioned before that Hugo seems to like giving us “ideal” characters who either fail their ideal or depart from it for some reason. I’m still turning this over, but it seems like his most ‘ideal’ people, the ones who are supposed to be the most likeable/admirable, actually stray from a strict interpretation of their ideal a LOT, for the sake of various human interests. And here SImplice is trying again to bend the strict definitions of her honesty, not to spare herself trouble, but to spare another person pain. This particular outbreak of flexibility is catching my eye since it seems like Simplice is set up especially to embody the virtue under scrutiny in her book—honesty that admits no silence is a big deal, here? But then it’s only because another person is requiring that honesty. I AM CONFLICTED ABOUT HOW I AM SUPPOSED TO FEEL RE: SISTER SIMPLICE, but I know I like her a lot more for trying to keep M’sieur Le Mair out of the sickroom right here. VALJEAN YOU WILL NOT BE HELPING. I’m sure it’s very significant that the mirror is a doctor’s diagnosing tool, but I’m still too brainstunned to come up with a good reason. He’s…showing the signs of a long illness? A doctor’s mirror is no tool for vanity, so this is a reflection (har, but I can’t think of another word) that he’s just confirming his appearance and not attending it? It Is A Good Idea Not To Let The Fatally Ill Woman Have A Mirror? …His hair has strep? At least we finally have some believeable physical whiteness! Yes, Hugo, really ill people often do get paler. Naturally pale people may even lose so much color they become actually white. This is a pretty good sign that things in the body have gone Very Wrong, since, you know, blood and tissue oxygenation are Good Things. If the blood’s not in her skin (Bright! Not just white!) it’s pretty surely gone somewhere it should not be— I’m guessing the lungs? Good ol’tuberculosis? Bronchial infection? …Pardon my Jolying. I realize Fantine has Symbolic Disease, but I can’t turn my inner medgeek off entirely here. At least Fantine’s grey hair makes sense— it’s been growing back, after what where already months if not years of severe physical and emotional stress. I can believe her hair’s grey. Which means, even if she were to have lived, she’d never regain the gold of her youth. It’s not growing back after all; it’s been spent. Pardon me while I go weep in a corner. Commentary Gascon-en-exile I’m going to shamelessly take advantage of your absence (though very glad to see you back nonetheless) by glossing over the courtroom chapters. Honestly, the biggest thing I could remark on any of them is that I forgot that Bamatabois is just randomly there as a juror. Hooray for contrived Hugolian coincidences! I also rather liked the satirical jab in 1.7.9 at the “''langue de province''" that was legal language of the time - equal parts flowery and artificial. I feel as though its "provincial" quality will bear further comparison when we get to the argot chapters, but that’s a long way off. I’m inclined to read Valjean’s hair color shift (especially given how rapidly it occurred in the courtroom chapters) as purely symbolic of the extreme moral and emotional turmoil he just experienced. As for Fantine, as someone writing in response to my diagnosis of MNCCD pointed out, another symptom is that the sufferer appears to become more beautiful as she gets closer to expiring. This is especially evident here with “''Elle ressemblait plutôt à ce qui va s’envoler qu’à ce qui va mourir''" because it pairs up two seemingly contradictory verbs - "flying away" vs. "dying" - with the implications of angelic beauty via flying angels. Of course angels in Christian belief can’t die, and I don’t know when the belief more commonplace today that the righteous dead become angels or at least like angels got its start, but it still shows up here nevertheless. I would assume lying by omission was a concept at the time, but Simplice is intending to deceive Fantine by action rather than word (by not letting Valjean see her) so that complicates things. Anyway, I’m hardly the right person to consult on questions of morality, my white garment having many (white) stains. Maedhrys Re: the symbolism behind it being a doctor’s mirror. This might be a little far-fetched, but it’s Hugo, so I’m going to throw it out there. The text specifies not just that it’s a doctor’s mirror but that it’s a mirror that the doctor uses “to see whether the breath had left the patient’s body.” As in, he’d hold it up to their nose and mouth; if there was no mist on it from their breathing, then they were dead. So for Valjean to look in a mirror that confirms life or death and see this radical change…that could symbolize that a stage of his life has died. Pilferingapples (reply to Maedhrys) YES THANK YOU that is the symbolism I felt lurking just around the corner! THANK YOU FOR LOANING ME YOUR BRAINS THEY ARE GOOD BRAINS. Maedhrys (reply to Pilferingapples' reply) You are welcome also my brains thank you Kalevala-sage I’m not too stodgy to admit your absence had me worried, especially given our last Skype chats have gone something like ”Hello, Pilf” / “I AM ON FIRE WILL BE AFK TREATING BURNS!” and “Hello, Pilf” / “OH NO MY UTERUS” / “Okay goodbye good luck with your uterus?”—hopefully that’s, er, sorted out (?); anyway it’s great to see you Clubbing again. The medical knowledge offered up by yourself and others is a wealth to which I could not possibly contribute; rather, it’s more in my place to be amused over the narrative’s continued love of the word “crépuscule,” which seems to have made a comeback from its old frequency in the Myriel chapters. I know my personal vocabulary is pretty cyclical (I’m sure I’ve said/written “expostulate” about a hundred times in the past month—seriously, it’s getting old, I need a new temporary favourite), but at least I’m not hypocritical about it, while, really, Hugo, weren’t you just a few chapters ago telling us how pathetic was the florid language of the “langue de province qui a longtemps constitué l’éloquence du barreau et dont usaient jadis tous les avocats?”1 That said, I wonder if there’s an analysis to be done on the periods over which Hugo wrote, motivated by the tracking of his word use; looking into the manuscripts, though, I’m not sure anyone would have the patience or squinting capability necessary to deal with our illegible source material. Also that would violate Death of the Author in just about every way, but oh, well… While Simplice’s insistent veracity is indeed hilarious, it could be argued that as one of the novel’s few flat characters she begins to wear down to a caricature in this chapter, what with her timid anxiety and the wholesome deceit she dreams up, gently asking Valjean to erase her “lie” to Fantine. If this were an action-comedy, a (slow) moral loosening (on her part, of course) at the hands of a seemingly-innocuous Valjean would certainly be playable for laughs—her Lawful Good alignment is a decent foil for his Neutral/Chaotic Good, anyway. No comment on Fantine’s ethereal sleep as that will just get me ranting about Mary-Sues and Lord knows my Brick!Club posts digress enough already. 1 "provincial tongue that had long been held as the standard of judicial excellence, and which was used by every lawyer”